


All Roads Since You

by aghamora



Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Future Fic, Jane the Virgin AU minus the virgin part
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-08
Updated: 2018-07-29
Packaged: 2019-06-07 07:57:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15214613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aghamora/pseuds/aghamora
Summary: She’s so, so screwed – though just figuratively, Laurel supposes, because there was definitely no actual screwing involved in the creation of the child now inhabiting her uterus. She hasn’t seen or heard from Frank Delfino in almost ten years, and now he’s managed to knock her up by proxy.Amazing.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Let me preface this by saying I wrote almost all of this back in 2015/16, so it’s ages old and my writing is pretty different than my writing now. But I was digging up my old unpublished fics and re-reading them recently, and this one struck me as worth publishing because I’d left it in a place I could easily turn into an ending, and also because this premise is still hilarious.
> 
> It also is technically AU and written with only what we knew at the end of season one. If you miss old school Flaurel/my old school fic style, I think you’ll enjoy this one. It should be around 3-4 chapters total.

“All right, Miss Castillo. Everything looks A-okay.”

This isn’t how Laurel had envisioned finding out she was pregnant for the first time would be.

She’d always figured it would be with one of those little convenience store pregnancy tests, and happy tears, and an ecstatic husband in a cozy three-bedroom house in upstate New York or Maine, away from the chaos of the city. Not a freezing cold doctor’s office, and uncomfortable crinkly paper on the exam table beneath her, and being inseminated with a complete stranger’s sperm. The actual insemination had been weeks ago, actually, and that had just been… beyond bizarre. Nothing like the romantic lovemaking sessions to conceive should be.

But romantic lovemaking sessions to conceive require a husband, which she does not have. And she’s not going to be able to have kids forever. She’s already thirty-two, not getting any younger, and she resents the idea of her biological clock ticking away, but she’s also acknowledged the reality of it.

And _that_ is why she’s here.

“So that’s it?” she breathes, forcing herself out of her thoughts. “I’m pregnant?”

“You are.” The doctor nods and smiles. “About four weeks. Due in late October. Congratulations.”

Laurel makes herself smile back. It isn’t that she’s not happy, because she is; she’s wanted to be a mother pretty much all her life. But she hadn’t expected to feel so suddenly alone, either, and she hates herself a little for her weakness, for longing for a hand to hold.

“You’re absolutely certain you don’t want to know the donor’s identity?”

Laurel shakes her head. From the start she’d decided not to, and there couldn’t ever be any contact; that much she knows for sure. She hadn’t chosen an open donor.

“No.”

“I have to finish up some paperwork for you then, and you’ll be good to go,” the woman says, rising to stand. “I’ll be right back.”

Laurel nods and watches as she disappears out the door. The silence that follows feels deafening, the white floors and walls in the tiny room blinding and cramped. Everything in the world seems to have shifted, suddenly. She’s pregnant. She has an actual tiny person inside her. A baby. _Her_ baby.

Hers, and a stranger’s.

No. She has to quit thinking like that. This baby is hers and hers alone, and that’s how she’ll raise it. But for some reason she can’t help but wonder about the implications of going without the other half of the equation, the man that society had taught her all her life she would need to raise a baby successfully.

Well, she decides. Fuck societal norms. It's 2025, after all, and she’ll do just fine by herself.

With a sigh, Laurel leans back against the wall and lets her eyes wander around the room. Eventually, they fall upon the countertop next to her, where a single manila folder the doctor had left behind rests. It’s filled with papers, with part of a picture and a name poking out of the top – and all at once, she realizes with a rush of adrenaline what it must be.

The donor’s file.

She should look away, but the more she stares at it, the more intrigued she becomes. The first name is all she can see, and it’s hard to read upside-down but she’s relatively certain that it says _Frank_. Laurel frowns at the memories the name calls to mind. She’d known a Frank what feels like a lifetime ago, before she’d left Philadelphia. She had moved back into the city a few months ago, hadn't ever thought of trying to find him. With the way things had ended between them, it was probably best not to.

That has to be some kind of strange coincidence, Laurel decides, as she glances over her shoulder at the door and hops off of the exam table.

The upper half of the picture, which shows only the top of a man’s head, doesn’t give much away, but now that she’s seen the name and gotten so close, her own morbid curiosity takes control. With an inexplicable sense of dread filling her stomach, she reaches out, grabs the folder, and flips it open, and-

“No.”

_No, no, no, no._

‘Frank Delfino’ is typed across the top in bold black lettering, and there he fucking _is_ , staring right up back at her with that beard and that cocky grin on his face she remembers all too well. All his information is there; his height, weight, eye color, blood type. _6’0”. 196 lbs. Blue._ _O+._ He looks younger than he was the last time she saw him – but without question it’s him. It’s Frank.

_Oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god._

The doctor chooses that moment to step back inside, and when she does Laurel practically pounces on her. “I-is this him? The donor?”

“I thought you didn’t want to…” The woman frowns. “Yes. That’s him. Why? Is something wrong?”

Laurel can’t even begin to find the words to answer her. She feels like she can’t breathe, like her knees are going to give out beneath her any second. Somehow, with the doctor calling after her, she manages to stumble out of the examination room, back into the parking lot, and into her car with the file in her hands – which may or may not be larceny and is most definitely a breach of HIPAA, but she really could give less of a shit at the moment.

It's only then that she lets herself break down.

She doesn’t cry. She thinks she’s having something of a panic attack, because it feels like a boa constrictor has wrapped itself around her chest and started squeezing relentlessly, but she isn’t sure. She isn’t sure of anything now, except that it’s _Frank_.

Frank is her donor. She hasn’t seen Frank is almost ten years and he’s her goddamn sperm donor and now she’s having his _kid._

It’s like serendipity in the worst way possible.

 

~

 

She calls Michaela.

They’d reconnected at her new firm over the last month or so, even though she’d never really liked Michaela much in law school, and she doesn’t have anyone else to call who would understand. Laurel doesn’t trust herself to be able to drive right now, either, because she’s shaking so badly that she can barely even stand, let alone guide a thousand-pound metal object down the highway without killing herself and anyone else. 

She’s there within twenty minutes and hops out of her car to find Laurel pacing anxiously around the parking lot, wringing her hands.

“Laurel?” she demands. “What the hell is going on? You’re lucky I’m my own boss and could leave to pick your ass up.”

“It’s Frank,” Laurel blurts out, her voice cracking. “It’s _Frank_!”

“Frank?” Michaela furrows her brow. “Frank who? Just… look, just calm down. What’re you talking about?”

She thrusts the file in her face. “My sperm donor. The guy whose _kid_ I’m having. It’s Frank!”

“Frank… as in Professor Keating’s Frank? Frank as in the one we worked with? As in the one you used to _sleep with_?”

“Yes, the one I used to sleep with!” she exclaims. “Unless there’re two Frank Delfino’s in Philadelphia who look exactly the same!”

“Holy hell,” Michaela murmurs as she flips through the file. “See, I told you having some random guy’s baby batter injected into you was a bad idea.”

“I don’t need an I-told-you-so right now, okay? I just…” Laurel drifts off. “Shit. Shit, shit, _shit_.”

Surprisingly enough, Michaela reaches out and places her hands on her shoulders to console her. “Hey. Calm down. It’s okay.”

“This is not okay, Michaela!” she cries. “This is not even close to okay! This is an entire fucking _galaxy_ away from okay! I’m so _stupid_ , I-“

“You’re not stupid. Now get in the car. I have to be back at the firm in half an hour. We’ll talk it over on the way.”

Numbly, Laurel obeys, settling herself into the passenger seat as Michaela starts the car and pulls out onto the street. The Yankee Candle air freshener hanging from her rearview mirror makes it reek of balsam and cedar, a combination that makes Laurel infinitely queasier.

“So what’re you gonna do?” Michaela finally breaks the silence. “Have an abortion?”

“No. Of course not.” Laurel takes a deep breath and tosses the folder into the backseat, where she can’t see it. “This was what I wanted. I wanted a baby. But not…”

“Not Frank’s?” Michaela finishes for her, and she nods. Michaela shakes her head in disbelief. “What’re the odds of that? It’s almost like fate or something.”

Fate. Laurel has always hated that concept. If this is fate – which she’s pretty sure it _isn’t_ – it must be having a blast fucking with her. If she were capable of laughter right then she might laugh at the horrific irony of it all, but instead she really, really just wants to vomit.

She notices Michaela pulling into the parking lot of a sandwich shop just then, and shakes her head. “I’m not hungry.”

As if in disagreement, her stomach gives a rather insistent growl, and Michaela rolls her eyes. “I get it. You’re upset. But you’re hungry, which means that kid inside you is also hungry, and just because you suddenly know it’s Frank’s doesn’t mean you get to let it wither away in there.”

Laurel raises her eyebrows in surprise. “That was… insightful.”

“Me and Aiden decided on a baby for early next year,” Michaela shrugs, yanking the key out of the ignition. “I’m practicing my unsolicited mom advice ahead of time.”

Laurel scoffs and follows her into the building. They eat their sandwiches afterward in the car, and Michaela watches with wide eyes as Laurel practically inhales hers.

“Careful,” Michaela warns. “You don’t want to pull a Jessica Simpson over there.”

“Huh?”

“I mean, you don’t wanna gain, like, three hundred pounds while you’re pregnant.” Laurel’s mouth is full, and so she settles on flipping Michaela the bird in silence. She laughs as she reaches down to start the car again. “Okay. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

They drive in silence for a while, before Michaela looks over at her and asks the question Laurel can only assume she’s been dying to know the answer to: “Are you going to tell him?”

That brings Laurel plummeting back down into the reality of things, and she sets down her half-eaten sandwich, her appetite suddenly vanishing into thin air.

“I…” she starts. “I don’t know.”

“Sperm donors don’t have any financial obligation to their kids, you know. _Fergueson v. McKiernan._ In that case the donor was ordered to pay child support despite an oral agreement not to, but the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned the ruling. Got him off the hook.”

Laurel has to fight the urge to roll her eyes. She swears Michaela will take almost any opportunity she gets to show off, even when there’s nothing to gain from it anymore.

“I don’t need Frank’s money,” she says. “And I don’t even think he’d want anything to do with the baby. He was a closed donor. That means no contact or anything.”

“Yeah, contact with random kids by random women that he’d never met,” Michaela reasons as she pulls over to the curb in front of Laurel’s apartment building and stops the car. “It’d be different if he knew it was you.”

Laurel doesn’t answer. Instead, she just steps out of the irritatingly sensible four-door sedan with a sigh and grabs the folder from the backseat. “Thanks for the ride. I owe you one.”

“Just make me the godmother of your tiny bearded spawn,” Michaela calls out after her, “and we’re even.”

Laurel can’t even find the energy to reply to that. All she does is turn her back, plod heavily up the stairs, and fall facedown onto her bed with a groan, letting her keys tumble onto the floor with a jingle. The laundry detergent she’d used to wash her sheets suddenly smells overpowering to Laurel too, and her stomach roils.

Morning sickness isn’t even supposed to start until five weeks; she’d looked it up. But of course it would hit early, just to join in on the universe’s let’s-fuck-with-Laurel-Castillo jamboree.

She’s so, so screwed – though just figuratively, Laurel supposes, because there was definitely no actual screwing involved in the creation of the child now inhabiting her uterus. She hasn’t seen or heard from Frank Delfino in almost ten years, and now he’s managed to knock her up by proxy.

Amazing.

_It’d be different if he knew it was you._

Michaela’s words echo in her head suddenly, but Laurel isn’t so sure. He doesn’t have any responsibility to her or to this baby that he didn’t have much of a choice in bringing into existence. If he’s anything like he was when she knew him, Frank Delfino is an asshole, a womanizer, an arrogant, nauseatingly well-dressed hair-gelled slimy son of a bitch, and what would she gain by telling him, really? She’d only gain complications to an already complicated as hell situation, and that is the last thing she needs. But then the realization that she can’t just _not_ tell him hits her right in the gut, and she groans again, burying her face into a pillow.

 _It’d be different if he knew it was you._ She doesn't know why, but Laurel can’t help but have the sneaking suspicion that Michaela might be right.

 

~

 

Tracking down Frank isn’t hard.

He’s a creature of habit. After only a few days of fairly intense internet and in-person stalking, Laurel has already discovered that he still lives in the same apartment in the same building and still works for Professor Keating. She hasn’t seen him, but she’d be willing to bet he looks nearly the same, only a few years older.

Tracking down Frank isn’t the hard part. Actually getting the courage to approach him is something else entirely.

She agonizes over it for days. She worries herself sick – or that might just be the morning sickness, but either way she's constantly puking her guts out and the additional stress is not making it any better. She runs through the conversation a million times in her head, rehearsing what she'll say, but it never seems any less terrifying, no matter how much practice she has. As the days go on, the idea of telling him somehow seems even more terrifying.

Then finally, late one night a week later, Laurel forces herself to go to his building, ascend the stairs to his floor, and stop in front of his door. _3E_ stares back at her in large, metal letters, and she gulps, every muscle in her body urging her to bail. But she knocks before she loses the nerve and waits impatiently for him to answer, fidgeting and squirming like a child. After a few seconds pass, however, she starts to grow more and more distraught. What little courage she has evaporates.

He’s probably out. Or still at work. Or worse: at home, with a girl in his bed. A new student of the month, younger and prettier than her and also most importantly _not pregnant_. She should just turn around and walk away before she gets hurt. She should just never tell him ever, because that would be easier for the both of them. That would-

All at once, the door swings open, and there he is, still dressed in a waistcoat from work with his sleeves rolled up to expose his forearms. Frank looks just like she remembers, though there are creases in his forehead and faint wrinkles on his face that hadn’t been there years ago.

There’s something so familiar about the sight of him that it almost makes Laurel melt, because this is him. This is Frank. Older, sure. Probably not wiser. Just the same.

 _Exactly_ the same.

Her breath catches in her throat. The only thing she can think to do is blurt out in way of greeting: “Frank.”

Frank furrows his brow. “Laurel?”

His eyes soften. His shoulders slump. His whole demeanor transforms when he lays eyes on her, and she notices. Something similar probably happens to her, too, all the wind knocked out of her like she’s been kicked, because it’s him. It’s _him_. All these years and looking at him still makes her feel the same: giddy, wanted. Terrifyingly, heart-stoppingly alive.

“I…” he clears his throat. She knows him well enough to know that he’s freaking out on the inside but hiding it behind a mask of nonchalance. “I didn’t know you were back in town.”

She isn’t here for small talk. Well, Laurel doesn’t really know exactly what she _is_ here for, but it’s decidedly not small talk. Without a word, she pulls the manila folder from her bag and holds it out to him, distress creeping steadily back into her voice.

“Tell me this is some kind of sick joke.”

She lets herself in and he shuts the door behind her, opening the folder with a frown. “Huh?”

“Just… tell me you have an identical twin with the same name. Or there’s someone in Philly who looks exactly like you.”

“What the hell are you-” He cuts himself off when he realizes what he’s holding and looks up at her, bewildered. “Where the hell did you get this? This is like fifteen years old.”

Her stomach twists inside her. Her insides liquefy. She’s sure she’s going to throw up.

_It’s true._

She’d known that deep down all along, but had hoped beyond sense that it was some kind of mix-up, some kind of mistake, some cruel joke, and now… Now, she has nothing to delude herself with anymore. No obscure possibility to cling to. Not a grain of sand to bury her head in. He’s holding the file and looking at it and saying it’s _his_.

“Oh my God,” she breathes, on the verge of hyperventilating. “It’s true. Y-you’re my donor.”

“Your donor?” he repeats. “Laurel, what're you talking about?”

The words come out so quickly that she can hardly understand them herself. “I’m getting older, and I’m not married or anything, and so I figured I’d just go to a sperm bank before I can’t have kids anymore and get pregnant and raise the baby as a single mom. And I asked for a closed donor, and I didn’t want to know the identity or anything, and they inseminated me like a month ago and everything was good, everything was _fine_ , and then I went to the doctor for a follow-up a week ago and I accidentally saw the donor file – _your_ file – and…”

She stops to catch her breath and can’t find the will to keep going, and they fall into what feels like the longest, worst silence in the world. When Laurel finally finds the courage to glance up at Frank, he’s gone pale, like he’s seen a ghost, and maybe he has.

Here she is, a ghost from his past, his ex-lover and ex-sort-of-girlfriend, showing up at his door and telling him she’s pregnant with his child, and _God_ , this situation is just so completely, unimaginably fucked.

“Holy shit,” is all he says at first. “Did it… work?”

She gives him a look of disbelief. “Yes it _worked_! On the first try. Apparently your sperm are fucking Olympic swimmers or something!”

“Y’know,” he raises his eyebrows, “if you wanted my Olympic swimmers that bad, I would’ve been happy to give them to you the natural way.”

Laurel gapes at him. Of all the moments he could choose to be an ass, he has to pick _this_ one? All of a sudden, she doesn’t know why she thought telling him would be a good idea, ever, when he still seems to have the approximate maturity level of a high schooler.

“Do not make a joke right now, Frank!” she exclaims. Suddenly, Laurel feels like crying, and she swallows, cheeks burning. “You know what? I shouldn’t have come here. I never should’ve even told you.”

“Never should’ve told me?” he raises his voice. “That’s my goddamn kid in there, Laurel!”

“No, it’s not,” she shoots back. He blinks at the harshness of her tone. “It’s not your responsibility. Not your legal obligation. You didn’t have any part in this. You’re a closed donor, and you don’t want any contact, and so…”

He looks confused, and pissed, but mostly confused. Also a little terrified – a sentiment she knows all too well. “So what?”

“And so you won’t get any,” Laurel finally manages to say. The tears are spilling freely down her cheeks now, and she feels even stupider for crying in front of him, her emotions all haywire and uncontrollable. “I won’t bug you again. I’m sorry I came.”

She turns to head for the door, but he calls out after her, the panic in his voice evident. “Wait, Laurel, I-”

She hates herself for it, but she turns to look back at him anyway. “I mean, I come here to tell you I’m pregnant and it’s yours a-and you’re making _jokes_. This isn’t a fucking joke, Frank!”

“I know that. I’m sorry,” he tells her. Her vision is blurry, but even through the tears she can see that he means it. “I know it’s not a joke, I just – shit, Laurel, this is a whole goddamn lot to take in at once.”

“Yeah, well,” she sniffles, wiping at her cheeks. “Imagine how I feel.”

“So… you’re pregnant,” he says tentatively. “Like for real?”

“Yeah,” Laurel gives a dry laugh. “It’s like the exact opposite of an immaculate conception, huh?”

Frank chuckles along with her, and she feels herself start to relax, start to breathe again.

“Come sit down,” he urges, in that voice like silk that she’s missed so much. “I’ll get you a drink – nonalcoholic. We’ll talk.”

“I can’t stay,” she shakes her head. “I mean, I could, but… I’m not here to try to rope you into any of this. I just thought you should know.”

Laurel turns again and goes for the door. Before she can get far, however, he reaches out to touch her shoulder, his grip firm but gentle. “Hey.”

Once more she looks back, and finds him with his lips pressed tightly together, as if in contemplation. “Just… don’t shut me out, okay?”

Laurel wonders for a moment if she’s imagining things. At the very least she’d thought Frank would be freaked out, if not really, really pissed, and now he doesn’t want to be shut out? Any other man in this situation would probably want nothing more than an out, but he isn’t lying; she can see the sincerity shining clear in his eyes.

And the realization hits her, out of the blue, that she _can’t_ shut him out. She never has been able to; not out of her life, not even out of her thoughts all these years. He’s always been lingering somewhere in the periphery, and now – now, he’s come crashing back center stage whether she likes it or not. Laurel can’t ignore that nagging thought inside her that she _does_ like it.

Would that it were under different circumstances, but – well, things between them never have been easy.

“Okay,” she finally relents. “Yeah, okay.”

Visibly relieved, Frank reaches out and opens the door for her. He’s looking at her tenderly, intently, like she hasn’t had anyone look at her in years. It unearths a deluge of old feelings she swore she’d buried deep inside herself, and all at once she feels pleasantly warm and tingling all over, thawing, like she’s come back inside to a fire after being out in the cold for years.

“It’s good to see you again, Laurel.”

“Yeah,” Laurel gives him a tiny smile as she steps out the door, her eyes lingering on his for just a half-second longer than they should. “It’s good to see you too.”


	2. Chapter 2

If there’s one thing Laurel hates, it’s doctor’s offices.

They’re always pristine and smell disturbing sanitary, like plastic and antiseptic attempting to masquerade as something welcoming instead. She’s in the waiting room at the moment, which isn’t quite as bad given the abundance of magazines and flat screen television playing a daytime cooking show, but right now she’s having trouble focusing on either of those things, checking her phone almost obsessively.

She’d invited Frank.

It had been a week since she’d seen him last when she’d decided to tell him about the appointment. She’d waited outside Annalise’s office for half an hour to catch him after work, and when he finally stepped out the door after locking up, she’d handed him a little piece of paper.

“I have my first appointment with my OB next Tuesday. That’s the address and the time,” she had told him, all the while trying to gauge his reaction. “You don’t have to come or anything, I just thought-”

“Yeah,” he’d interrupted her gently, with a pleased little smile on his face. “’Course. I’ll be there.”

But now it’s ten past the time Laurel had given him, and he still isn’t here. At first, she buries herself into an article in In-Style magazine about the upcoming spring trends, but quickly realizes that they won’t matter at all to her, because by spring she’ll start to blow up like a balloon and nothing except maternity jeans and frumpy blouses will fit her. After a while, she starts watching the clock on the wall nervously, bobbing her knee and trying to convince herself that he’s just running late, or stuck in traffic, or couldn’t find the place, or some combination of all three.

But then it’s fifteen minutes past, and the clock’s ticking seems infinitely louder, almost as if it’s mocking her. Her mind automatically starts running through worst-case scenarios.

He’d probably freaked out, blown her off. She can’t say that she blames him. He’s a closed donor, not wanting anything to do with any of his kids, and there she was showing up at his work to invite him to a goddamn doctor’s appointment like a fool, like that dumbass wide-eyed idealist she used to be. How had she been so stupid? She hadn’t been looking for a partner in this – or anything, really – when she’d gone to him, but then he’d stared at her with tender eyes and given her that _don’t shut me out, okay?_ and she had thought maybe, just maybe, this was what he wanted.

It’s sixteen past, now. Clearly, this wasn’t what he’d wanted at all.

“Laurel,” the nurse calls out from the doorway. “We’re ready for you.”

Her heart drops. It’ll be another appointment alone, with no one to talk to, no hand to hold. The fact that every other woman in the waiting room has a supportive husband or boyfriend or partner by her side certainly doesn’t help. Her OB will probably be friendly enough, but it’s not a replacement for actual company. She doesn’t know why she’s bothering to throw herself a pity party at all when it was her choice to do this alone in the first place, and so she sucks it up and gets to her feet – when at the last second, she hears the bell on the door ring behind her to signal someone’s arrival.

Not bothering to get her hopes up, she turns briefly to see who it is, and in strides Frank in one of his familiar grey three-piece suits, looking disheveled and winded – but there.

He came.

“Hey. Sorry,” he greets, out of breath. “Couldn’t find the place. Am I late?”

Laurel lets out the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding and smiles. “No. You’re, uh, right on time, actually.”

They follow the nurse into one of the exam rooms, and after the doctor arrives, Laurel goes through the typical round of polite if not droll introductions with her. Afterward, the woman’s eyes settle on Frank. “And this is?”

Laurel briefly considers lying. Her husband? No, that weirds her out way too much to serve as a convincing lie. Her boyfriend sounds equally strange, because he was never that either, and her donor sounds creepily technical. Ex-lover won’t work either, but luckily for her, Frank speaks up instead.

“Frank,” he replies smoothly, not missing a beat. “The baby daddy.”

Laurel blinks. _The baby daddy._ Wow. That sounds… surprisingly right.

The rest of the appointment is tedious, consisting mostly of the litany of typical questions: _How are you feeling? Any problems to report? Bleeding? Morning sickness?_ It’s too early for an ultrasound or anything else, and so after giving her a quick exam, the doctor sends them on their way with an armful of pamphlets and prenatal vitamins. Frank manages to talk her into getting a coffee with him afterward at a place nearby, though she gets a hot chocolate just to be safe. She’s glad to have the chance to talk as adults, actually, instead of the emotional shouting match they’d had a week ago. Because that’s what they are: adults.

Adults who haven’t seen each other in years and are now suddenly having a baby kind-of-but-not-really-together, but still. Adults.

“So,” she looks over at Frank, as they stroll down the sidewalk sipping their drinks. “Baby daddy? Really?”

“What?” He shrugs. “I kinda like it.”

She furrows her brow, staring down into her cup. “You’re being weirdly calm about all this.”

“Not really,” he admits. “I’m still freaking the hell out.”

“It doesn’t seem like it.”

Frank winks at her. “I’m a good faker.”

“I thought you weren’t coming, today,” she confesses. “When you were late.”

“You think I’d flake out on you like that? You’re having my kid. I’m not some punk bitch who runs away from his responsibilities.”

“I didn’t mean to make this your responsibility, though. I can do it by myself,” she tells him. “From the start that was what I was gonna do: be a single, working mom. I have a good job, good income. But I won’t… shut you out or anything. I’m just-”

Laurel closes her eyes and sighs, the breath visible in the cold winter air. After the events of the past few weeks, she’s barely been sleeping, and exhaustion rolls over her in a wave. “I’m just way too tired to have this conversation right now.”

“So we’ll have it later,” he answers with surprising nonchalance. “We got time. Nine months.”

“Seven and a half,” she corrects him. “I’m already six weeks.”

He lets out a low whistle. “Damn.”

“I know. It’s weird,” she chuckles, sobering up after a moment and glancing sideways at him. “Can I ask you something?”

He takes a sip of his coffee. “Shoot.”

“Why did you even do it?” Laurel asks. “Donate sperm? I mean, unless you needed the money or something, but I know it doesn’t pay well.”

“Nah,” he shakes his head, unabashed. “Just did it for the hell of it.”

She snorts. “Of course you did.”

“Look at it this way: with me as your baby daddy, you’re gonna get a crazy cute kid out of this. Silver lining.”

She laughs. “Good point.”

As Frank watches her smile, the grin slowly falls from his own lips, and another look takes its place. He stops walking, and when she notices, so does she, fidgeting under the intensity of his gaze.

“You still look beautiful after all these years, y’know,” he finally tells her, voice buttery-smooth.

She blushes. She can’t remember the last time anyone complimented her so earnestly. “Maybe you don’t look half-bad yourself.” Laurel glances down at his left hand, and upon finding it devoid of that telling gold band, looks back up at him. She tries to keep her tone casual, and she’s sure she fails miserably. “No, um, no wedding ring?”

“C’mon, you know me better than that,” Frank jokes. “I’m a perpetual bachelor. You?”

“Me?” she makes a sound of disbelief, then lowers her eyes to her drink again. “If I was married I wouldn’t have even bothered with the whole sperm bank thing in the first place.”

“Yeah, well. I’m glad.”

She frowns. Her heart is beating a little too fast for her liking with him so close, and he’s far too close for her liking as well – or at least that’s the narrative she’s sticking to. “Glad I’m not married or glad I bothered with the sperm bank?”

“Both,” Frank says.

She’d forgotten how he just comes out and _says_ those kinds of things. She’d forgotten how much she liked that about him.

Laurel snaps out of it quickly and pulls out her phone to check the time. “I have to go. I have to be back at work in half an hour.”

“Oh yeah? Where’s that?”

“Pratt & Associates.”

He chuckles, tossing his empty coffee into a nearby trashcan. “Pratt? You workin’ for Prom Queen now?”

“I was applying at a bunch of firms around the city. It just worked out that way. She’s not as bad as she used to be.” Laurel shrugs. “I have to go, though. Seriously. We’re meeting with an important client and I can’t be late.”

“Come over some time. I’ll cook you dinner.” Frank notices her hesitance. “Relax. It’s not a date. We’re having a kid together. We should at least catch up.”

Laurel shifts her weight from one leg to another, unsure. After so many years she supposes that they _are_ technically strangers now, but somehow it doesn’t feel like it. They still jive so naturally, like she never has with anyone else.

She remembers that thing Michaela had said about fate, and swallows. “I… I’ll think about it.”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Frank smirks as he turns to go. “You know where to find me.”

Laurel watches him vanish into the crowd without a word, her mouth as dry as a desert. She doesn’t know how he does that just by looking at her, even after so many years; how he makes her feel so-

She doesn’t know. Only she does.

She knows all too goddamn well. She just won’t let herself give that feeling a name. 

 

~

 

 Two weeks later, as Laurel is wandering down the hallway back to her office at the firm, one of the secretaries calls out her name to stop her and holds out an envelope.

“This came for you today,” the woman explains, and then disappears around the corner.

It’s addressed to the firm, but written across the middle of the envelope is ‘ATTN: Laurel Castillo.’ At once, Laurel finds her eyes drawn to the return address, where ‘Frank Delfino’ is scrawled in familiar handwriting, and somehow, it doesn’t catch her off guard. She’d expected him to contact her one way or another and she supposes that this is really the only plausible way, since he no longer has her phone number and she doesn’t have his.

With a feeling of giddy anticipation buzzing in her head, Laurel waits to get back to her desk to open it, and when she does she finds a simple piece of notebook paper inside with the perforation sloppily torn off the edge.

_Come to my place for dinner. Saturday at six. I’m making whatever you want._

_Text me._

He’d written his number below, and for some reason, it makes her almost stupidly happy to see. With a grin, she reaches into her pocket, withdraws her phone, and creates a new contact for him.

In the back of her mind, she remembers the shirtless selfie Frank had assigned to his own contact image what feels like ages ago, in another life, and chuckles under her breath. Never for a second back then would she have imagined she’d be where she is now: working for Michaela, having Frank’s sperm-bank kid. Wes had moved out of Philadelphia after graduation like she had, but she still talks to him occasionally, and she sees Asher, who’d followed in his father's footsteps and become a judge, in the courthouse at least once a week. The last time she saw Connor was commencement day, though she isn’t terribly upset about losing touch with him, because she’d never particularly liked Connor.

Throwing those thoughts aside, Laurel opens up a new message and types Frank’s name in the recipient box. _You're really gonna cook for me?_  she types, hitting send just as Michaela’s voice jolts her back into reality.

“Hey, press pause on your thrilling social life for a sec and come have lunch with me. My treat.”

Laurel looks up and finds Michaela standing on the other side of her desk, dressed to the nines in an immaculately tailored blue skirt suit and Jimmy Choo’s. She gives her a funny look, as if trying to deduce her reasons for inviting her, and the other woman rolls her eyes.

“Don’t squint like that; you'll get crow’s feet. Just come on. We’ll go to Mia’s.”

Mia’s. Laurel’s favorite little corner café two blocks down from the firm. _That_ makes her even more apprehensive.

But she isn't about to turn down free food when she seems to be hungry 25/8 these days and stands anyway, grabbing her coat with a huff. “You don’t have to take me out to eat all the time just because I’m pregnant, you know.”

“I’m not doing it because you’re carrying around a little bundle of Delfino DNA in there,” Michaela scoffs. “I’m doing it because I’m a good friend.”

“Friend?” Laurel almost does a double take, ignoring the ‘Delfino DNA’ comment. “I didn’t know pregnancy could make you hear things.”

Michaela rolls her eyes but gives her a small smile. “Whatever. Remember that one. I’m not saying it twice.”

They walk the short distance to the café and get a table, and almost as soon as they sit down, she finds herself caught dead-center in the crossfire of one of Michaela’s trademark interrogations.

“So,” she starts off with a casual tone, though it’s clear she’s dying to know. “Did you talk to Frank yet?”

Laurel blinks. _Oh._

“Is that why you asked me here?” she scoffs. “To pry information out of me?”

Michaela actually has the gall to look offended. “What? No!”

“Michaela…” Laurel deadpans. Michaela is a great lawyer but a notoriously shitty liar; an unlikely combination, in their business.

Finally, she gives in. “Fine. But can you blame me? Ex-lovers reunited almost ten years later when one of them gets knocked up with the other’s sperm at a sperm bank. It’s almost like the plot of a bad rom-com.”

“Yeah, well, there’s nothing romantic _or_ comedic about this situation, thank you very much. Feels more like a shitty telenovela.”

“So you talked to him?” Michaela presses.

“I never said that.”

“If you hadn’t you would’ve denied it. Come on, Laurel. Spill.”

 Finally, Laurel caves. “Fine. Yeah, I talked to him.”

“Well? How did he react?”

“How do you think?” She shakes her head, burying her face into the menu even though she damn near memorized it in law school. “I hadn’t seen him in like ten years and suddenly I show up saying I’m pregnant with his kid. He was freaked out. Made some stupid joke about giving me his sperm the natural way.”

“Well, that would’ve been cheaper. And if he still looks like he did back when we worked for Keating… not entirely unpleasant.” Laurel’s upper lip curls in pseudo-disgust, and Michaela waves dismissively with one hand. “Whatever. So? What’d he say?”

“He told me not to shut him out,” she confesses. “And so a week later I invited him to a checkup. And he came, and we had coffee afterwards. It was… nice. He even called himself my-”

The second Laurel opens her mouth to mention that she regrets it, but Michaela leans in, literally on the edge of her seat. “Your what?”

Laurel lowers her eyes and mumbles into her glass of lemon water, “My baby daddy.”

Michaela snorts, and Laurel glares at her. “Do not _laugh_ at me, Michaela!”

“Sorry.” She sobers up quickly and shakes her head. “It’s just funny. Frank is your _baby daddy_.”

Laurel places her hands on her temples, massaging them gently. “Can you not say that so loudly, please?”

“Why not? It’s a fitting title,” she says. “He still look any good?”

“Oh, yeah.” Laurel fails to catch the dreamy sigh before it escapes her lips. “Really good.”

“You still like him.”

Laurel shrugs, not bothering to deny it. “We slept together and kind-of-but-not-really dated for almost three years. It’s not like those feelings just go away.”

“What happened between you guys after graduation, anyway?”

“I don’t wanna talk about it,” Laurel murmurs, flattening her lips into a grim line. “It was… ugly.”

Michaela changes the subject abruptly. “Hey, you think if it’s a boy, it’ll come out with a beard?”

Laurel resists the urge to bury her face in her hands. Oh, God.

“Do not put that image into my head-”

The light vibration of her phone in her pocket cuts Laurel off, and she reaches in to look at it.

_1 New Text Message. From: Frank._

- _Of course. For old times' sake. Whatever you want._

Her heart momentarily seizes up inside her. A stupid giddy smile plays at her lips, and Michaela catches it in an instant.

“Who’s that?”

“Uh, no one,” Laurel mutters, but for some reason can’t bring herself to switch off her phone and take the message out of sight. She just keeps staring at it – because she has to admit, she's missed their banter, how it’d always flowed so naturally with no effort at all, how matched for wit they were.

Are. They still _are_ those people. Maybe, she thinks, they can be those people again. Together.

Always a mind-reader in the most irritating of moments, Michaela’s jaw drops. “It’s Frank, isn’t it?”

“No, it isn’t. It’s my… brother.”

“Bullshit, Laurel. You’re as red as a damn tomato.”

Dammit. Laurel is usually reasonably good at hiding her emotions, but the blush she can feel scalding her cheeks gives her away in the blink of an eye. 

Michaela takes her silence as affirmation. “What’s he want?”

“He invited me over for dinner on Saturday. I’m not sure if I should say yes.”

“Are you kidding? The guy you just admitted you still have feelings for slash your unwitting baby daddy is asking you to dinner, and you’re _not sure_ if you should say yes?”

“It’s not that simple, okay?” Laurel snaps. “I’m not trying to rope him into this. I don’t need a man to-”

Michaela puts up one hand to stop her before she can start. “Please, spare me the spiel about how you’re a strong independent working woman who don’t need no man. You don’t think it’d be easier to have this baby with him instead of alone?”

“I don’t know. I just…” Laurel sighs. Suddenly she no longer has much of an appetite for the sandwich sitting before her. “I don’t know.”

“Look, I’ll stop prying,” Michaela tells her, much to Laurel’s surprise. “But… you should say yes.”

Laurel glowers at her. “I thought you said you’d stop prying.”

“I am now,” Michaela promises. “No more prying. Even though my two cents is worth, like, a dollar from anyone else.”

Laurel isn’t entirely sure what that means and doesn’t care enough to ask. Instead, she focuses her attention on her phone, only to find that he's sent another message.

 _-I'll let you in on a little secret:_ _Italian is my specialty._

- _I never would’ve guessed. Surprise me._

- _You’ll be there?_

Laurel smiles.

- _Yeah. I’ll be there._

She looks up, expecting to find Michaela across from her, practically expiring from curiosity. But she isn’t, and when Laurel moves her head to the side to glance around, that's when she bumps it into Michaela’s.

She’d been standing behind her. The whole time.

“Michaela!” she exclaims. “What the hell?”

“Sorry. Sorry!” Michaela scurries back to her seat. “Look, you can’t just except to shut me out like that and _not_ have me snoop. _Don’t shut me out, Laurel_.”

Michaela lowers her voice in a poor parody of Frank’s, and Laurel clenches her jaw. “Sometimes I wonder why I took this job.”

“Because you knew I’d be flexible about your maternity leave,” she answers without missing a beat. “And because I’m a damn good lawyer.”

Laurel shakes her head and turns her attention to the waiter. She can’t exactly argue with that one. 

 

~

 

Laurel spends an embarrassing amount of time choosing an outfit for Saturday night.

She knows she shouldn’t care so much. This isn’t a date, a fact which she seems to have to remind herself of very often. If anything, this is just a… reunion.

A reunion between friends. Catching up. But that doesn’t mean she can’t look nice for it.

Thankfully, since she’s only two months along and hasn’t gained much weight yet, all of her clothes still fit. Eventually she settles on her most form-fitting jeans, suede boots, and a hunter green sweater, then grabs her purse and hops in the car. At six on the dot she’s at Frank’s doorstep, twiddling her thumbs nervously as she waits for him to answer.

The door opens, and she greets him with a smile. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Frank pauses for a moment, taking in the sight of her from head to toe, his eyes lingering just long enough and just _low_ enough to let her know that he likes what he sees. He snaps out of it after a moment, however, and steps aside. “Come in.”

She catches a whiff of food in the air and hums her approval. “Smells good. I would’ve brought wine or something, but I can’t exactly drink it.”

“Nah. It’s fine,” he says, leading her into the kitchenette. “Sit down. I’ll get your coat.”

Laurel nods, hands it to him, and takes a seat at his table, peering around his apartment. It looks almost exactly as she remembers, with the same leather sofa, the same coffee table and chairs, the same paintings and guitar in the corner. There are still as many bottles of liquor sitting around as there used to be, and it occurs to her that Frank’s lifestyle doesn’t seem to have changed very much over the years, either.

Things are different, now. But somehow, in this place, they still feel exactly like they did years ago.

Frank sets a glass of ice water in front of her and turns back to the stove. She cranes her neck to see what he’s doing. “What’s for dinner?”

“Chicken parmigiana,” he answers, in a rather poorly-done Italian accent. “Or, in layman’s terms, chicken parm.”

She scoffs. “Thank you for dumbing it down for me.”

“Sure thing,” he says, putting the chicken in the oven, grabbing a glass of red wine off of the counter, and taking a seat across from her. “Not everyone can be an Italian master chef.”

Laurel doesn’t laugh. Instead, she just stares at the wine in his hand with what she’s sure is a look of unmistakable longing on her face – because she knows that she can’t drink it now, but that doesn’t mean she can’t _miss_ it. Desperately.

He realizes what she’s looking at and sets the glass back down on the counter, out of sight. “Sorry.”

“No. It’s fine. Seriously. You can drink it,” she replies. “I just really miss wine.”

“I’d imagine you’d need a hell of a lot of it to tolerate working for Prom Queen.”

Laurel grins. “She’s not that bad anymore. I don’t mind it.”

“What is it she does again?”

“Women’s issues. Gender discrimination. Domestic violence. Lots of divorce. I did the same stuff back in Chicago.”

He raises an eyebrow. “That why you’re not married?”

“Probably,” she shrugs, taking a sip of her water. “I see all the time how ugly it gets. How it hardly ever lasts. I don’t know, it just seems pointless to try.”

“What happened to the cliché idealist from Brown?”

“She became a realist,” Laurel says with a rueful smile. “The world kinda takes it out of you.”

“That’s too bad. I liked that about you.”

Their eyes meet, and a blush creeps over her cheeks before Laurel can stop it. She’d forgotten how it feels to have him look at her, closely, gently, like she’s the only person in the world to him in that instant. She’d forgotten a lot of things about him.

Missed a lot of things about him, too.

“So,” he changes the subject. “How long you been back in the city?”

“Five months.”

“Why pick here to settle down?”

“I don’t know. Things in Chicago weren’t working out. I needed a change, and I liked it here in law school.”

And maybe – just maybe – some teeny tiny traitorous part of her subconscious had been thinking of him, Laurel realizes. Of coming back to _him_.

“You never thought about stopping by to say hello?”

Laurel hesitates. Though Frank’s tone is more playful than confrontational, it still feels like a loaded question, and so she purses her lips. “I didn’t think you’d want to see me. And after how things ended… part of me didn’t want to see you.”

Frank is silent for a moment. “You know I didn’t mean for us to end like that.”

“You didn’t?” she frowns, a spike of long-held anger piercing through her without warning. “It kinda seemed like you did. When you cheated on me.”

It had been the last week before graduation when everything had gone to shit. She’d had an amazing job offer from a firm hundreds of miles away in Chicago, facilitated by the summer associate position she’d held in her last year of law school. He’d asked her not to go, to stay with him in Philly, and she’d refused, “because I can’t give up my career for whatever this is, for something that’s just… _sex_.” After that, he’d slept with Sasha to hurt her, and she’d found out and revenge-fucked Kan, who she’d been broken up with for two years at that point.

There had been a screaming match after that, the night before graduation. Insults flying left and right. It had been awful, because over the years they had gotten particularly good at doing and saying precisely the right things to hurt each other. Then she’d graduated, blocked his number, packed her things, and gotten on the plane to Chicago without saying goodbye.

That had been the end of that. They’d left things between them like an open wound, and it still pains Laurel just to think about. At least, she thinks, they’d gone down in flames, burning out instead of fading away. There was no uncertainty that their relationship, love or lust or whatever the hell it was, was over; somehow, she imagines that not knowing would have been worse.

Frank tenses up, scowling. “Yeah, well, if I remember correctly, you cheated too, Laurel. If you can even call it cheating, because you made it clear to me that we were never dating in the first place.”

“I-” she stops herself, not knowing what to say. With a huff, Laurel shoots to her feet. “Never mind. I shouldn’t have come tonight.”

She only makes it a few steps towards the door before he stands and reaches out to stop her. “Don’t. Look, I’m sorry. It’s an old fight, Laurel. There’s no point in havin’ it now.”

Slowly, Laurel turns to look at him.

“Yeah. You’re right. There’s other stuff that we need to talk about,” she lowers her voice, eyes creeping almost subconsciously down to her abdomen. “Stuff that’s… bigger than just us, now.”

He nods, his eyes following her hand to her stomach, and takes a step towards her. “How’re you feelin’? Really?”

“I’m fine,” she answers, folding her arms. “I’m nauseous all the time, so I’ve kinda been living off saltines recently, but I’ll survive.”

Frank grins. “Well, then it’s about time our kid had a decent meal. We’ll get it hooked on Italian in the womb so it comes out drinkin' my special sauce instead of formula.”

It’s a joke, and in any other situation Laurel would laugh because it _is_ pretty funny, but she doesn’t. Instead, she just furrows her brow. “We?”

“’Course.” He looks confused. “Why? What’s wrong?”

“Frank, I…” Laurel shakes her head. “I don’t need a partner in this. My plan, it was… It was to do this alone.” Hurt flickers in his eyes, and she heaves a sigh, feeling her stomach start to roil from the smell of herbs and spices. “I’m not saying you can’t be involved. But, just, you being back in my life all of a sudden, and now we’re having this baby together and I don’t know if I’m ready for _together_ because together was never part of my plan-”

“Hey,” he cuts in. “We’ll take it one step at a time, okay? Baby steps.”

Laurel can’t answer. She’s too afraid she’ll puke all over him if she opens her mouth. She can feel bile rising in her throat, her gut churning like the sea in a hurricane, and _God_ , she hates throwing up _so much_ -

She must go positively green, because he notices. “You all right, Laurel?”

“I-” she swallows, then promptly clamps a hand over her mouth. “I-”

Without warning, she pushes past him and all but sprints into the bathroom, barely making it to the toilet in time to fall to her knees, lean over the toilet, and hurl into it. Her hair falls in front of her face, and she’s trying to scramble to move it out of the way when she feels a pair of large hands sweep it off her shoulders in one swift motion. She feels Frank crouch behind her, the heat of him like a steady reassurance, and although she feels like absolute shit, his presence makes her feel a little less so, somehow.

All the times she’s thrown up over the course of the past few weeks, never once has she had anyone to hold her hair. It’s a small gesture, a tiny consolation, but it’s more comforting than she ever could’ve imagined.

After her stomach settles, she takes a deep breath and mutters, “I’m sorry. This is so gross.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Frank replies, offering her a wad of toilet paper to wipe her mouth. “Here.”

She takes it gratefully. “Thanks.”

Laurel tosses it in the trashcan and then leans back against the wall beside the toilet, unable to summon the energy to get to her feet. Frank follows suit, and they remain like that for a few minutes without speaking, as her breathing slows and the nausea passes.

“So,” Frank finally remarks. “Was the smell of my cooking really that bad?”

She shakes her head. “No. It smells great. I just can’t keep anything down, and smells have really been getting to me lately.”

“Darn. Maybe the baby isn’t as big a fan of Italian as I thought.”

“I’m sure it will be. Or they,” she corrects herself, drawing her knees up to her chest. “I probably shouldn’t call them an _it_.”

Frank eyes her closely. “It’s crazy, y’know. That you ended up with me as your donor when there’s gotta be thousands of others in Philly.”

“Yeah,” Laurel agrees. “I mean, during my first appointment they gave me this questionnaire thing to describe my ideal… mate, I guess. All I remember saying was that I wanted someone tall, and muscular, with dark hair and blue eyes, and-”

She looks over at Frank and freezes. _Holy shit._

He chuckles. “Add a beard to that and you’ve pretty much got me, princess.”

“Oh my God,” she breathes, burying her head in her hands. “I described _you_ as my ideal mate.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t blame you. Even back when we were not-dating I thought we’d make adorable babies.”

She can’t help but smile. “You really thought that?”

“Yeah. And now we will, so count yourself lucky.”

“Lucky?” she scoffs. “What, like you shouldn’t be counting yourself lucky to be having a kid with me, too?”

“Fair enough,” he quips with a wink. “I’m honored to be have you as my baby mama.”

They share a laugh, and Laurel rests her head back against the wall. “Doesn’t it freak you out?”

“What?”

“Knowing that you… sowed your seed all around Philadelphia. I mean, there could be forty little Frank Jr’s running around out there and you wouldn’t even know.”

“Sowed my seed?” He cringes. “Don’t call it that. And until you showed up I’d kinda forgotten I even did it.”

“Well, you took it way better than I thought you would. I thought you’d be mad at me.”

“Mad? No. Surprised as hell? Yes. It’s not every day your ex-not-girlfriend shows up at your door telling you that you got her pregnant even though you haven’t seen each other in years. And if you were anyone else, yeah, I probably would’ve felt different. But after what we were to each other…”

 _After what we were to each other._ They had never been anything to each other but sex, not really, but somehow, she knows what he means. It had always felt like something more, something deeper than either of them would ever admit. Even now, it still does.

“It still feels so surreal,” Laurel mumbles, glancing down at her still-flat stomach. “I mean, I _know_ I’m pregnant. I spent months thinking it over, making plans and everything. But I’m not showing and it… feels real, and somehow it doesn’t. Does that make sense?”

He squints in contemplation. “Kinda. But I’m not the one who’s knocked up, here.”

She laughs again, and he gets to his feet, holding out his hands to help her up. An inexplicable rush of heat floods her cheeks, and when she reaches out to take them, she feels her skin tingle, like she’s touched a live wire. He lets go as soon as she’s up, but she can still feel where they had touched, and she clears her throat. For a moment Frank doesn’t move, just stays where he is, several inches too close for comfort, until Laurel catches a whiff of burning food in the air.

She sniffs. “What’s that?”

“Shit,” Frank swears, darting out of the bathroom and back into the kitchen.

Laurel follows him, and steps back into the kitchen just in time to see him yank open the oven, only to be greeted with a puff of smoke in his face. He coughs, fanning it away, and hardly a second later, his smoke alarm blares.

When Frank finally pulls the chicken out, it’s black and charred, and the ominous screech of the fire alarm feels like a fittingly dismal accompaniment. He scowls at the sight. “Dammit.”

“There goes dinner.”

“So much for authentic Italian cooking,” Frank exhales sharply and dumps it into the trash, then reaches for his phone. “I’ll order a pizza. What do you want?”

“Just cheese. And pepperoni,” she says, then adds as an afterthought. “And anchovies.”

Frank furrows his brow in disbelief. “You want anchovies?”

“Yeah,” she says with a shrug. “What? I’ve been craving them.”

Frank looks disgusted but doesn’t question her further. The pizza arrives within the hour, and they sit down to eat, chattering away like the old friends that Laurel supposes they kind of are. She hasn’t really wanted to eat anything for three days, but for some reason the pizza tastes like the most delicious thing she’s ever had in her life, and eating it at a reasonable pace is a struggle.

She’s staring at one of the last remaining pieces of pizza in the box with what must be blatant hunger in her eyes when Frank finally notices. She’d been trying to pace herself, not shove all the food down her throat at once, even though that is honestly all she really wants to do.

“You can eat, Laurel,” he tells her. “Seriously. It’s fine.”

Eagerly, her hands go for the slice. “I’m trying not to stuff my face.”

He shrugs. “The kid’s gotta eat, and so do you. Although your choice of topping is questionable. Hopefully it doesn’t come out with gills.”

They finish dinner shortly afterward, and after helping him clear the table, Laurel looks at the time.

“I should probably go,” she says, reaching for her purse. “I have to be at the office early in the morning.”

Frank frowns and sets down the plate he was washing. “Tomorrow’s Sunday. Prom Queen not give you the weekends off?”

“She does, normally. We have an important client coming in the morning, and she makes us work around her schedule.”

He nods, heading for the door and holding out coat out to her. “I’ll walk you to your car.”

“Frank, I-” she hesitates, as she takes her coat and slips it on. “I don’t need you to do that. Seriously. It’s not that far.”

He ignores that and holds the door open for her. “It’s late, and dark.” She opens her mouth to protest, but he stops her before she can start. “I know you’re gonna say you don’t need protecting. You probably don’t. But you’re my baby mama, and I’m keeping you safe.”

 _Baby mama._ Laurel blinks, surprised once more by how much she likes the idea of that. She would be lying if she said this protective, papa bear side of Frank isn’t turning her on a little, because it is. More than a _little_.

She chalks it up to her hormones. They’ve been all out-of-whack recently.

She’s blushing, and she knows it. Thankfully, the darkness conceals it, and so she just nods. “Uh, yeah. Okay.”

They descend the stairs and walk out into the parking lot, the freezing night air hitting her like a slap in the face. Her car is barely a hundred steps outside the building by the curb, and yeah, she absolutely doesn’t need an escort, but she’s glad for the extra few minutes with Frank. She half-wants some excuse to linger longer, though she knows precisely how unwise an idea that is.

They come to a stop outside the driver’s side, and she turns to him with a smile. “Thanks for dinner. It was great.”

“Yeah, well, next time I won’t burn it.”

“Next time?” she asks, a gentle breeze tossing strands of hair in her face. “I’d like a next time.”

For a long moment, Frank just stands there, looking at her without a word. Laurel thinks for a moment that he might lean in to kiss her, which she… wouldn’t mind, actually.

She wouldn’t mind that at all.

But he doesn’t, because apparently during the last ten years he’s gotten a handle on his impulse control, perhaps better than she has. Instead, Frank just snaps out of it and reaches out to open the car door for her. “Drive safe.”

Laurel steps in, but before she shuts it behind her, she glances back at him and smiles. “I will.”

She closes the door and starts the car, immediately cranking the heater up as far as it will go. Frank steps out of the way as she pulls onto the road again, in the direction of her apartment. She happens to look in her rearview mirror, after a moment, and finds Frank still standing in the parking lot, watching her, his hands tucked into the pockets of his coat, silhouette dark and imposing in the shadows. Even from afar she can feel the weight of his gaze, the meaning in it; those feelings, pent-up for years and years and finally, finally, finding their outlet once more.

She watches him until he’s out of sight, and it’s only then that she looks away.

 

~

 

Two weeks later, she’s at his doorstep again.

This time, it’s to invite him to another doctor’s appointment. In hindsight, she could’ve just called, or texted, like any sensible person would and should, but she’d wanted to come in person. She’d wanted, against all logic and sense, to _see_ him. They’d had dinner at his place for the second time last week, and it had been almost like the first date that they’d never really had. They had talked. Laughed. Reconnected. Snapped back together so easily, like no time had passed at all in the interim.

It’d been nice. So unimaginably nice. This is fifty shades of a bad idea, Laurel is well aware of that – but suddenly, things between them feel _possible_ , again. Everything feels possible again.

Laurel knocks, and Frank opens the door a minute later, dressed in his casual clothes, a sweater and jeans and sneakers. She smiles brightly as soon as he comes into view, allowing herself to be eager for the first time. “Hi.”

“Hey,” he greets almost tentatively, cautiously. “Everything okay?”

He looks uncomfortable, for some reason. She doesn’t comment on it, however, and takes a step inside. “Yeah. I just came here to-”

The instant she enters his apartment, Laurel stops dead in her tracks.  

There’s a woman sitting on his couch, making herself comfortable with a glass of wine. She’s brunette, pale-skinned, beautiful. Younger than her, too – much younger, and perkier, and bright-eyed. She’s eyeing Laurel with equal surprise, her immaculately plucked eyebrows raised, and it doesn’t take Laurel long at all to realize who she is.

His girlfriend. Or worse: his student of the month.

Laurel feels like she’s been slapped. Or kicked, in the stomach, right where it hurts the most. It’s like the Sasha thing all over again – except worse. _So much_ fucking worse.

She turns to look at Frank, wounded but trying to hide it. “Oh, I… I’m sorry. I didn’t know I was interrupting something.”

“You weren’t,” Frank tries to assert, but Laurel doesn’t buy it, not for a single second. He may look sorry, but he isn’t; she knows him well enough to know that. Sorry he got caught, maybe.

It’s not like this kind of thing hasn’t happened before.

“Who is this?” the girl finally pipes up. In the back of her mind, Laurel remembers uttering those exact same words, years ago.

She _was_ this girl, years ago.

Laurel gulps, her cheeks burning with humiliation. “Uh, no one. I was just stopping by to invite you to my checkup next week. But I think-” she drifts off, lowering her eyes. “I think I’ll just go.”

She takes one last look at the girl, then at Frank, before finally turning and bolting out the door as fast as she can manage. She has no right to be mad, or surprised, and she knows that perfectly well. They’re not in a real relationship. This baby isn’t some kind of promise ring that mandates fidelity. What the hell was she really expecting from someone like Frank, anyway? What was she thinking, assuming that she could just barge into his life out of nowhere after so long, when he’d already moved onto other things, other women?

She feels stupid, and furious at herself, and she wants nothing more than to be out of this building, as far away from Frank as she can get. She’d sworn the night this happened the first time with Frank that she would never allow anyone to make her feel that way again – worthless, second-best, _used_ – and now he has all over again.

Just as she’s about to reach the stairwell, however, Frank’s voice echoes down the hallway after her. “Laurel, wait.”

She stops but doesn’t turn – not at first. Her eyes are watering, the pain amplified a thousand times by her hormones, and the last thing she wants is to let him see her crying over him, to admit she’s given him that power.

“Don’t, Frank,” she says. “It’s fine. I’m sorry I barged in like that-”

“I only invited her over to end it,” he interrupts her. “Nothing was going on.”

She gives a shaky laugh, finally meeting his eyes. “You don’t have to lie for my sake. And it’s not like we’re exclusive, or even… _anything_ to each other-”

“C’mon,” he reaches out to her. She pulls away, and he knits his eyebrows together, hurt. “You know that’s not true.”

They are silent for a long, tense moment. Then, Laurel’s curiosity – or perhaps her masochistic tendency to cause herself even more pain – gets the better of her. “Is she your student of the month?”

Frank doesn’t say anything. He doesn't have to; he just looks at her with guilt in his eyes, and she has her answer.

“Right,” she breathes. “Like I was.”

“You weren’t. Laurel, you gotta know you were so much more than that,” he says, taking a step closer. “I’m ending things with her. Tonight. For you. That’s the only reason she’s even here-”

He’s telling the truth. Frank is a damn good liar, but when he’s this close to her and looking her square in the eyes, she would know if he were lying. His eyes are wide with sincerity, burning into hers, begging. She makes herself break the gaze before she can lose herself and cave. She’s mad at him, fucking furious, her blood boiling in her veins, and she’s more furious at herself for being mad at him. She’s furious at herself because he still matters to her – so much – and the idea of him with another woman kills her. It eats her alive, makes her skin crawl.

She let herself love him, once. She will not make that mistake again.

“Don’t bother. This baby’s my responsibility. It’s not like you really had a say in… any of it.” He opens his mouth to protest, but she continues. “I don’t want you to have to rearrange your life because of it. Or me. I just – I’m gonna go.”

She takes a step down the stairs, and again, his voice sounds out to stop her. “You said you had a doctor’s appointment.”

“Yeah,” she looks back and tells him coldly. “Don’t worry about it.”


	3. Chapter 3

“Can you believe Mrs. Thompson’s husband? What a slimy son of a bitch. Squirreling money away. Leaving her and their three kids for his secretary. And now he’s stopped paying the mortgage on their half a million-dollar house, so soon they’ll be out on the street.”

It’s late afternoon at the firm the next day. She’s sitting behind her desk in the office, listening to Michaela rant as she flips through a stack of paperwork absentmindedly. She feels queasier than usual this morning, so bloated that the jacket of her pantsuit would hardly even fasten, and just all around… off. Something feels  _off_.

She’d been trying not to think of Frank, and  all at once Michaela’s rant provokes an irrational surge of anger inside her.

“Well,” she deadpans, not looking up from her work. “Some men are just fucking philandering, lying pigs.”

There’s an overt note of malice in her voice, and Michaela picks up on it easily. “What’s going on with you? Something happen with Frank?”

“No,” she rolls her eyes, irked by her intuition. “Nothing happened.”

Michaela takes a seat in the chair before her desk, a strikingly sincere look on her face. “You look upset. What’s going on?”

For a moment Laurel almost gives in and tells her, but a strange little twinge in her abdomen steals the words off her tongue. She can’t quite call it a pain, because it doesn’t  _hurt_ , but it’s enough to make her frown and shift in her chair. 

“Seriously, you okay, Laurel?” Michaela’s voice brings her out of her thoughts.

She brushes it off and nods. “Yeah. I’m fine. We have to get back to the Breton case, though. She’s alleging that she was passed over for a promotion because she’s a woman and not because of her performance, but if Stanford & Byers doesn’t settle and this goes to trial…”

She drifts off when she feels another stronger, more insistent twinge in her belly.

This time, luckily, Michaela doesn’t notice. “They’ll evidence those bullshit performance reviews they gave her, I know.”

“Maybe it  _was_ her performance,” Laurel suggests. Michaela scowls, and she shrugs. “I mean, there’s no evidence that men with similar performance reviews in that position were ever promoted to the position in favor their female counterparts; the records show it’s almost fifty-fifty. Maybe it’s not discrimination at all.”

“She’s our client! What’s going on with you today?” Michaela snaps. “I mean, whose side are you on here, Laurel?”

Another twinge. This one almost hurts. She’s starting to feel almost like she can’t breathe, like something is pressing down on her chest, and she feels the sudden need to move her legs, move something.

“I don’t know. I’m sorry,” she apologizes, as she slowly rises to stand, restless. “I’m… I don’t know, I just feel kinda weird all of a sudden.”

Michaela gets to her feet as well. “You need me to get someone?”

“No,” she mutters as she walks past the large bay windows in her office, towards the glass door that leads outside. “I’m gonna step out for a sec.”

Her hand goes for the doorknob, her lungs burning for a breath of fresh air, and she’s just about to turn it when-

“Oh my God.”

Michaela’s voice sounds out suddenly to stop her. Laurel freezes when she hears the fear in it. It’s unmistakable. 

“Laurel…” she murmurs, and when Laurel turns, she finds that Michaela has clasped a hand over her mouth in shock, her eyes wide.

“What?”

Michaela doesn’t respond. She almost looks like she’s staring at her ass, and so, bewildered, Laurel follows her gaze, glancing down between her legs.

And that’s when she catches sight of the blood.

She pales. All the air leaves her lungs in one long, shaky exhalation. It’s stained the crotch of her pants, standing out in stark contrast to the blindingly white fabric, like a gory streak of paint on a blank canvas. There’s so much that it has even started creeping down her thighs.

It’s everywhere, and it’s red. Red as death.

 

~

 

The ambulance arrives in a flash of blue and red lights.

Laurel had protested at first. “No, don’t call an ambulance. It’s not life-threatening. I can drive myself to the hospital. If I’m miscarrying there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it.” But Michaela had ignored her, as Michaela is wont to do, and now she’s standing at her side, helping her over to the curb and into the ambulance and doing her best to comfort her.

It all feels surreal. She isn’t crying, or shaking, or even speaking. She just feels numb, like she’s in another person’s body, living another person’s life and going through a set of preprogrammed movements. All she can see is the red, flashing behind her eyelids every time she blinks, and it makes her so dizzy that she almost trips over the curb.

Fortunately, Michaela is next to her to catch her before she can fall. “Hey. I got you. It’s okay.”

The paramedics stand by, watching with grim looks on their faces. One of them helps her climb into the back of the ambulance and settle herself down onto the stretcher, but when Michaela tries to do the same, they reach out to stop her.

“Are you family?” one of the men asks. Michaela gives him a look of disbelief that quickly transforms into a glare.

“Do we look related, asshat? I’m black!” He opens his mouth to respond, but she holds up a hand to stop him. “But if you waste another  _second_ asking me if I’m family and that second ends up being the difference between her losing her baby and not, I will make sure you are slapped with a lawsuit so hard your five-times-great-grandchildren will feel it. Capiche?”

The man blinks, raises his hands in capitulation, and steps back to close the doors, leaving the two of them alone in the back. Laurel looks over at Michaela gratefully as the ambulance takes off in the direction of the hospital, and the other woman smiles in return.

“Threatening to sue always works like a charm,” she tries to joke. “Just mention that you’re a lawyer and you’ll have anyone shitting their pants.”

Laurel makes herself smile, to accept some levity into this bleak as hell situation, but it ends up looking like more of a grimace. After a moment, she glances down between her legs again, the blood bright and sickening, and she feels hot tears burn her eyes.

“I’m gonna lose it,” she murmurs, the reality of the situation hitting her all at once. She can almost physically feel the baby slipping out of her, the safety of her body, everything she’d hoped for slipping away with it like sand through her fingers.

Michaela shakes her head. “Don’t say that.”

“It doesn’t matter even if we get to the hospital quickly. There’s no way you can stop a miscarriage. It happens in one out of five pregnancies. I read that online,” she chokes out, her voice breaking. “I barely even felt anything. It just… slipped away.”

“You don’t know that,” Michaela tries to reassure her, but it sounds unconvincing, half-hearted. Sensing that, she pauses and sighs. “You should call Frank.”

“I don’t want to call Frank,” she shakes her head. No, she doesn’t even want to  _see_  Frank – not after last night, after seeing him with his student of the month. That had been like fucking torture, the worst way in the world he could have possibly hurt her.

No, she doesn’t want to see him. Not after last night. Not ever again. She knew the moment she showed up on his doorstep that first time that this was all a giant mistake. She’d ignored her own intuition, ignored every sign. He’d fooled her once, and that was shame on him. Now he’s fooled her twice, and this time it's her own sorry fucking fault.

But Michaela just gives her a look, reaches down into Laurel’s purse, grabs her phone, and unlocks it, undaunted as ever.

Laurel’s jaw drops. “How do you know my passcode?”

Laurel reaches for the phone, but Michaela scowls and pulls back. “I’m doing this for your own good.”

Laurel frowns, but relents and lies back down, watching as Michaela dials his number and brings the phone up to her ear.

“Frank? It’s Michaela.” There’s a pause, after which Michaela sighs. “It’s Laurel. She… look, she might be losing the baby. We’re on our way to children’s hospital.” Another pause. Then, Michaela looks at her and holds out the phone. “He wants to talk to you.”

Her throat tightens. The tears brimming in her eyes finally find their way out and tumble down her cheeks, and she waves her away, shifting to the side so that her back is facing Michaela. After a moment, Michaela gets the hint and goes back to speaking with him, her voice muffled by the screeching of the sirens above them.

 

~

 

It’s only after she peels off her bloody pants and changes into a hospital gown that she actually breaks down.

It’s less blood than it looks, the nurse assures her, but that’s no comfort to Laurel – none whatsoever. There’s no way to know for sure if she’s miscarried without an ultrasound, the woman goes on to say, or if it’s just a threatened miscarriage, and so she gives her another pair of underwear with a maxi pad to catch any further bleeding, then disappears out the door.

Bit by bit, as she sits in the hospital bed with Michaela at her side while they wait for a doctor, the story about Frank and his student of the month comes out in tearful, only semi-coherent fragments. By the time she’s done, her eyes are red and puffy and pathetic, her voice hoarse, and Michaela looks about ready to throttle someone.

“You don’t have to stay, Michaela,” she sniffs, wiping at her cheeks. “I know we have that appointment with Mrs. Richards-”

“Mrs. Richards is a stuck-up old bag who I tolerate because her visits help me burn through her retainer fee,” Michaela sneers. “I’m not leaving you alone like this. You’re my friend.”

“Friend?” Laurel manages a watery laugh. “I thought you said you wouldn’t say that twice.”

“Yeah, well. I’m making an exception today.”

The nurse appears in the doorway again and clears her throat to draw their attention. “Miss Castillo, you have a visitor. A tall man. With a… beard.”

Laurel purses her lips.  _Frank_.

Like a bodyguard, Michaela gets to her feet immediately and raises herself to her full height: a terrifying 5’4”, boosted considerably by her four-inch heels. Laurel wonders momentarily if she plans on utilizing said heels as a weapon.

“You want me to go out there?”

“No,” she mutters. “Let him come in. And… would you mind running to my place to get me a change of clothes? My keys are in my purse.”

Michaela shoots her a doubtful look. “You sure you want to be alone with him?”

“I’m a big girl, Michaela,” Laurel scoffs. “I can take care of myself.”

Reluctantly, Michaela disappears out the door after grabbing her keys, and after she’s gone, Laurel draws her knees up to her chest and pulls the scratchy cotton sheets up to her chin. She wants nothing more than to see Frank, and at the same time she wants nothing more than to throw him out, to send him away – but she can’t. Even after last night, she wants him here with her. She  _needs_ him here with her.

She can’t do this alone, no matter how many times she’s told herself otherwise. The realization hits her square in the chest. But now, there might not even  _be_  anything to do alone.

After a few minutes, Frank appears in the doorway. He’s in a suit from work, which it occurs to Laurel that he must have left to come here, but he looks more frazzled than she’s ever seen him. His cheeks glow red from the cold, more than a few of his slicked-back hairs out of place, and his eyes are wild, filled with panic.

“Laurel,” he exhales her name in one long breath, approaching her bedside tentatively and taking a seat in the chair next to her. “What the hell happened?”

“I…” she tries – and fails – to find her voice. It cracks pathetically, and the dam behind which she’d been holding her tears breaks. “I don’t know, I-”

Frank reaches out his arms to her. “Hey. Come here.”

“No,” she hisses, more harshly than she’d intended. “ _Don’t_.”

“Laurel-”

Not wanting to start this conversation right now, she cuts him off. “I started bleeding at work. That’s what happened. It didn’t even really hurt. The nurse said there’s no way to know for sure if I miscarried unless they do an ultrasound. It might be fine… but – I don’t know, there was so much blood.”

Frank doesn’t answer. He looks almost like he’s had all the wind knocked out of him and is trying to recover, and without warning she finds herself enraged that he should pretend to care so much when he  _doesn’t_ , when she knows perfectly well he doesn’t after last night.

“You’d be off the hook if it’s gone, you know,” she lashes out, sniffling. “So I guess this could be your lucky day.”

That isn’t fair and she knows it. Laurel can see the instant she says the words that they wound him.

“How could you say that? How could you  _think_  that?”

“Do you know how much it hurt?” she pipes up, her voice smaller and less steady than she wants. “To see you with your student of the month? It was like that night all over again. Only now-” She bites out a humorless laugh. “I’m on the other end of it. Karma, I guess.”

“Hey. Listen to me. The second after you left, I ended things with her. For good. She doesn’t mean anything to me. But you do, and so does-”

He is interrupted by the sound of the door opening, and in steps someone she can only assume is an ultrasound technician, judging by the large cumbersome machine she has in tow. Laurel sits up immediately, panic hardening like a block of ice in her stomach.

“All right, Miss Castillo, they sent me in to have a little look-see,” she announces, uncharacteristically chipper in this dismal situation. “Let’s see what the status of the heartbeat is, okay?”

Laurel forces a grimacing smile and sits up, letting the woman drape a sheet over her lower half while she tugs her gown up around her hips to expose her stomach. Frank sits by in silence as she applies gel to her belly and guides the wand across it as her eyes move to focus on the screen. Laurel’s follow immediately, and out of her peripheral vision, she can see his do, too, though he doesn’t dare reach for her hand in a show of comfort.

Nothing, at first. Just a deafening silence, echoing like a sonic boom. Then-

A thump. Then another. Less thumping, she thinks, and more of a steady, repetitive _swoosh_. But it’s there, against all odds. Tiny. Improbable. There.

That’s all that matters. It’s  _there_. She sees the screen, those indistinct blurs of grey and white and black, and she can’t make out anything or make any sense of it – but that sound. She can make sense of that.

There’s a knot in her throat the size of fist, choking back her voice, but before she can say anything at all she feels Frank reach over, slipping his hand into hers almost unconsciously with his eyes glued to the screen, rapt. She knows she should resist, push him away, but she did that once and they ended up crashing back together anyway. She can’t deny there’s something that feels inevitable between them; they’re tied together by this fuzzy grey blob on the screen, this heartbeat pounding over the speakers like the beat of a drum.

Improbable, too, this connection of theirs. But also very much  _there_.

“Everything looks great,” the woman announces with a grin. “Heartbeat sounds good. Very strong.”

Laurel doesn’t realize she’s crying until she switches the screen off and the audio cuts out. Only then does she feel the dampness on her cheeks. She hadn’t realized just how much she’d wanted this baby until now; after finding out about Frank, she’d been too preoccupied to focus on this, on what is really important. On why she did this in the first place.

Of course she hadn’t factored Frank into this equation. But Laurel looks at him now, as wide-eyed and stupefied as she is, and she doesn’t think some recalculation would be bad at all.

The technician excuses herself after a few more minutes, leaving the two of them alone in the silence once more. He still hasn’t let go of her hand, and she hasn’t pulled away, and although the room is filled with quiet, her failure to do so speaks volumes. After a while, he begins to stroke his finger idly back and forth the space between her thumb and forefinger, and she looks his way with a watery smile.

“That was…” He drifts off, that ever-present wit long gone. He’s speechless for the first time she’s ever seen. “I, uh… I’ve never heard anything like that.” Laurel can’t find her voice. She only continues to look at him, and he laughs in something like disbelief. “That’s our kid, huh?”

_Mine_. She resists the urge to throw that in his face and be cruel when she very well could be. She planned on _mine_. She never signed up for _our_.

She’s getting used to  _our_ , though. It no longer feels unwelcome.

“I’m-” Frank starts, then clears his throat. “I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry, Laurel, she wasn’t any-”

“I know,” she murmurs, silencing him immediately. She gives his hand an almost imperceptibly light squeeze. “Let’s not talk about it anymore, okay?”

Frank doesn’t say anything, for a long time. Then, he swallows. “Never stopped loving you, y’know. All these years.”

She’s not entirely sure she wants to talk about that either, and Laurel squirms. “Frank-”

“You never wanted to call it that, I know. But that was what it was. I know you felt it too, and… I know you feel it now. We spent so long trying to run from what we felt, denying it, but this-” He laughs again. “All this happening now, this baby – you don’t feel like this was meant to be or something?”

Laurel doesn’t soften just yet, but does smirk. “I’d say it’s more ‘twisted cosmic joke’ than ‘meant to be’.”

He wilts slightly. “Look. If you don’t want me around, I get it. Tell me to go, and I’ll go, and I won’t bother you again. I know getting me wasn’t part of the deal. But… you got me anyway.” Frank pauses, glancing up at her timidly. “If you want me.”

Another pause. Laurel could swear it’s the longest in the world. She could swear it takes hours before she finds her voice, but finally-

“I do,” she tells him, tightening her grip on his hand. “Want you. I do.”

The Laurel of ten years ago would’ve sooner died than ever admitted that. The Laurel of ten years ago put her heart on lockdown and moved forward with her brain nine times out of ten, even when it was ultimately to her detriment.

The Laurel of now, though, isn’t nearly as good at that. Once she would’ve despised herself for that weakness, but she’s no longer sure it’s weakness at all. She feels so weak right then, opening herself up, handing Frank the skeleton key to destroy her if he pleases, and yet she also feels unbelievably powerful. She forgot the way he used to make her feel so strong, the strength she found in being loved by him.

“You believe in fate?” she asks abruptly, and he leans forward, closer to her; so close she could kiss him if she wanted, and she isn’t sure she doesn’t, and she’s very sure  _he_ does.

“Not ‘til now,” Frank murmurs. “Not ‘til this.”

When he finally presses his lips down on hers, the world goes still behind her eyes. She feels all the passion, all the pain they’ve caused each other over the years poured into that kiss, but she also feels a profound sense of peace. Belonging. Like this right here is her coming home, at last.

Laurel has never believed in fate, either. She always despised the idea that the course of her life was predetermined, that her choices meant nothing, that she was only ever able to be a passive participant in her own existence. When she left him, she thinks part of her was subconsciously trying to thwart the hand of fate, but Laurel supposes she should’ve known it would lead her right back to him regardless.

Fate's got a sense of humor at least, she thinks. And fate's got a funny way of working out in the end.


End file.
